The Legaco Express for Paralegals Blog and Blog Roll

The best of paralegal blogging in one place.

The remarkable journey of Christine Beshar, currently senior counsel at Cravath’s (in the trusts and estates department).

In 1971, she became the firm’s first woman partner. However, she had never gone to law school; instead, she had begun her career as a secretary and a switchboard operator. Later on, through dedication and hard work, she “read up for the bar” and then passed the exam.

The Office software suite is changing! If you haven’t heard, Microsoft is really pushing the new Office 365, which is all of our old standbys from the Office Suite now delivered on a subscription basis, rather than purchasing that familiar box with the software on CD in it. Along with the standard programs, Word, Excel, Outlook, etc., is cloud integration, meaning you can access the software as well as your documents created and edited in them from any computer or connected device.

Are Facebook and Twitter a good place to find defendants for service of process? Probably. Service via email and social media may be an economical and effective option for serving process on foreign parties, or even domestic parties that are otherwise difficult to track down by traditional means. However, the authenticity of user accounts and proof that users have actually opened or seen the relevant message remain a key issue.

"The longer you wait, the farther -- and faster -- you will have to go just to catch up. You will be left behind in the ashes." The ongoing trend, described by the authors as a "fire," however, presents opportunities in the form of re-growth and regeneration to those who are innovative and entrepreneurial.

The 2014 U.S. News law school rankings have just been published. For the first time time employment statistics were taken into account to compile the rankings. Graduate placement rates now account for 20 percent of a school’s overall score and a greater weight is allocated to permanent full-time jobs that require bar passage or for which a J.D. is a recruitment advantage.

For most paralegals, performance review interviews can be a time of stress and fear, with supervising lawyers spending only 10 minutes on the interviews, providing reports with no specific feedback, basing their opinion on the most recent events, or forgetting to recognize their paralegals when they do a good job.

An analysis conducted by the CEB, a member-based advisory company, based on a recent survey of 180 in-house departments with the objective of examining different practices among comparable units but with very different expense levels, concluded that, to increase efficiency, legal departments should:

Kristina Gjerde is an expert on the legal aspects of marine conservation and is an advisor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Maritime law is a challenging area of the law: because no single jurisdiction nor central authority exists, this legal field consists of a patchwork of international treaties and national legislation, leaving many loopholes and unclear situations.

I have been thinking about my career goals. I would like to be the perfect paralegal, wouldn’t you? Hmmm, what would make me the perfect paralegal? For starters, I would like to always know what the attorney wants; never make a mistake; only work on big cases; know how to do everything possible; and never get emotional about a case. Let’s see how this would play out in real life…